Since I got burned loosing all my VMs, I made sure I keep my management VMs on a local disk in the Tower Server. On the Tower Server I host my management VMs. My old Tower Server is connected to the VSAN Datastore but does not currently contribute any storage. Below is an overview of the setup and how things are tied together.
#BUILD NAS FOR MAC MAC#
To my joy, my three Mac Minis were finally able to run VSAN and it was completely stable. So the 9 th October came and vSphere 5.5u2 was finally here. I heard it was likely to solve my problems. In all my eagerness I’ve already migrated the majority of my VMs onto the VSAN Datastore so I pretty much lost my entire home lab.Īfter complaining to my colleagues, I found out that AHCI controller support for VSAN was coming in vSphere 5.5 U2. Hugely disappointed I had to run my home lab on local attached storage and my dreams of VSAN was just that, dreams. The reason for the instability is that the GA release of VSAN did not support the AHCI controller. I recovered the disk back up through a simple reboot but then the next disk went down. While I managed to get VSAN up and running it was only running for an hour or so before I lost one disk in my VSAN setup. (I managed to get away with it because I replaced it with an Apple-TV.) I took one HDD and the SSD from my old Tower Server and put it into the i5 Mac Mini. I waited for the GA release of VSAN and on the release date I decided to go for a pure Mac Mini VSAN setup so I stole my families HTPC which was a late 2012 Mac Mini model with a i5 CPU.
I quickly realized that VSAN didn’t support my setup. This setup gave me some extra resources and together with my old Tower Server I could start building my VSAN Cluster. I also upgraded the memory to 16GB RAM in each Mac Mini.
#BUILD NAS FOR MAC UPGRADE#
Since VSAN requires one SSD and one HDD I had to upgrade them using the OWC Data Doubler Mounting Kit. To keep cost down I found two used late 2012 models with i7 CPUs. Now that I have decided to build my home lab, I went and bought my first Mac Mini. It is not used in my home lab and for reasons I can not really explain I wanted to keep it separate and use a separate storage solution for my home lab.
While I have Synology NAS I only use it for my private files. I was going to build a Mac Mini cluster using VSAN as storage. At the same time I started to hear about VSAN and my design was pretty much decided.
#BUILD NAS FOR MAC CODE#
I perform many tests using early code drops and on a daily basis I run my home lab to deliver live demos. In my role I produce a lot of blog posts and internal enablement material. If you want to keep up with the latest news in the VMware End-User Computing space make sure to follow me on Twitter, my handle is When I’m not a guest blogger, I frequently blog on the official ThinApp and Horizon Tech blogs. That said, you should understand that I’m far from your ESXi and vSphere expert. I cover two products VMware ThinApp and VMware Workspace Portal and one feature the Application Publishing feature of VMware Horizon 6. I fortunately have the opportunity to limit my focus on a very few products and truly specialize in these. Let me first introduce myself, my name is Peter Björk and I work at VMware as Lead Specialist within the EMEA EUC Practice. I finally knew how I would build my Home Lab. The first time I was briefed on VMware VSAN, I fell in love. *** This is a guest blog post from Peter Bjork ***